the long time coming update

Well, it's really been a while since I posted an update. One reason for not blogging is that I've had a real spark of energy lately and have been working on zinepal quite a lot. When I'm coding and tweaking, then there isn't much time for blogging.

I've made many further improvements to zine layout and the zine creation workflow. As I explained in my last post, zines now always use a two column layout. One thing I've done to further improve the visual appeal was to add "Georgia" and "Arial Black" to the font choices. Wait a minute, two more fonts and this is worth mentioning in a blog post? Turns out that choosing "Arial Black" for the story titles and "Georgia" for the main text makes the zines look much better. Little things really make a big difference. I've also tweaked a few other areas, such as not underlining the titles and instead adding a gray line after each story. Story authors and dates are now also shown below story titles by default. Oh, and did I mention that headers are now always kept together with the following paragraphs? All these tweaks and details result in much better looking zines.

This polishing work was prompted by the fact that I really wanted someone to actually print zines and distribute them. All the work paid off in that the first 100 printed issues of kitsilano.ca were distributed to coffee shops around the neighbourhood. This was an experiment to see if there is interest and if the zines would get picked up. Turns out it worked very well and we went through all 100 copies quickly. Next up we will be looking at printing 1000 issues in March and distributing them all across Kitsilano!

To support the larger distribution of zines I'm also adding advertising support to the site. It's still a work in progress, but in future all zine creators will be able to insert advertising into their zines.

The last change that I should mention is the improved zine creation workflow. The front page now features a big text area for directly entering feed URLs. A new zine preview is available so you can customize the zine and see what it looks like, before you create the final version. Adding a recurring zine is now also much easier - you can do it directly from within the normal workflow. You no longer need to use a separate form. Again, while it is not a huge change, it has made the site much easier to use. I've definitely noticed the difference when showing zinepal.com to someone that has never used it before. It's much more intuitive.

Apart from these bigger items I've also put a lot of work into fixing smaller bugs and glitches. Better handling of broken HTML, weird character encoding issues, better auto-detection of feed content, letting users manually select what content is in a feed, and more things like that.

That's it for today. Stay tuned for the advertising features coming soon!